June 2011

A 13 year-old girl in the psychiatric unit of a Texas hospital was scheduled to be released after a month long stay. She was due to be picked up by Children Protective Services (CPS) and taken home, but wasn’t. Her adoptive mother no longer wanted her unless she could be assured that the girl had long term care and that any psychiatric problem would no longer manifest itself. She believed she had been misled by the adoption agency and would have not adopted this girl slightly over a year ago had she known. The girl had been sexually abused, removed from her home, put in a variety of foster homes meaning some kind of trauma had to have been assumed. The CPS worker, who seemed to agree with the adoptive mother, did not pick up the child. The psychiatrist, apparently an elderly dour person passed over for a senior position at the hospital, was dilly dallying about readmitting the girl, or changing his discharge order so that she would legally have a place until the situation could be resolved. The sympathetic nurse—who shared the story with me—was helpless. And the girl kept calling her adopted mother thinking she would go home even though to others it was clear she wouldn’t.
A few days after I was told this story, the girl was given back to the custody of her adoptive mother who checked her in a long term mental institution although the evidence for her need to be there is quite moot.
Some people are more alone than we can fathom, and when they are under-aged and part of a system that fails them it can’t help but evoke sadness and anger.

We’re used to think of human trafficking in relation to sex, but a new report from World Vision issues an alert on labor trafficking. People particularly in East Asia are being sold into slavery in several industries, but most commonly the fishing, food processing and domestic work ones. The report estimates that in the region there is an estimated 3 people being trafficked for every 1,000 inhabitants. Globally nine people are forced to work for every person forced into the sex trade. Among the facts cited by the report is that men and boys are often imprisoned on fishing boars, that legal recruitment agencies are sometimes complicit in trafficking, that some factories hold workers against their will with no pay, that some victims of labor trafficking are exploited in their home countries.
I read about this and my heart sank. But then I realized that not only did organizations such as World Vision work to combat such evils, that the report itself is a sign of hope—how else could we know about the problem and begin to redress it?

When Rainer Hoess was 12 years old he discovered that his grandfather as the commandant of Auschwitz was a mass murderer. The gardener of his boarding school, an Auschwitz survivor, beat him “black and blue” when he found out his identity. Leaving aside the reaction of the gardener, how would we react where we to find out that family members had committed unspeakable acts? It’s difficult not to feel touched by the burden these young lives were—and are—forced to carry. In Germany, where the Holocaust is taught and spoken about, lest it ever happen again, the descendants of notorious Nazis are only now revealing their identity, and even then sometimes at the cost, like Rainer Hoess of being ostracized by the rest of their family. Reading about the atrocities affects all of us; knowing that they happened reaches deep into our psyche; and to add to that the fact these atrocities were committed by someone you either revered or were supposed to, someone with links to you, is a hardship worth much compassion. To be blamed by association for something you didn’t do and something you abhor would have to be one of life’s deeper injustices.